Gordon Stevens - Provo

In many ways Philipa Walker’s two lives were similarly organized. Just as there was no indication of the austerity of the study in the rest of the flat, so there was no indication in her everyday life of the second into which she occasionally disappeared. Her day-to-day existence was also divided and equally organized: she had professional colleagues and personal friends, the two rarely coinciding. Her affairs were seldom casual ones, almost always lasting more than six months; the most recent had ended two months before. It was a life-style Conlan had encouraged. Build a cover, he had told her the day she had committed herself, establish yourself so that no one will ever suspect. Continue the life to which her own background automatically pointed and she would be so immune she would be untouchable. Establish a career that allowed her to take time off, so that no one would even notice when she slipped from what had become her cover into the sub-world to which he had introduced her.

In the strictest definition, Walker was not a sleeper. A sleeper is an agent recruited from or infiltrated into an organization and required to remain inoperative until activated. Walker’s role was neither of these, yet in a less traditional sense her background provided everything a sleeper could require: layer upon layer of cover built up over the years – in her case a background provided by the very establishment she now opposed.

She locked the flat and walked to the top of Primrose Hill. In the distance, glistening white, were the modern tower blocks of the City; in the middle ground Oxford Street; just below the hill, less than three hundred yards away, was London Zoo. Sometimes she would lie awake and pick up the faintest smells, reminders of those places her official passport said she had not visited. Sometimes – even at two or three in the morning – she would leave the flat and sit on the top of the hill, draw in the night air for a taste of those places. Occasionally, just occasionally, they would waft across the hill and drift through the window of the flat when she was making love. Then the images would come back to her: then she would slip into an almost subconscious memory of the places where she had executed the profession to which Conlan had led her. Not those where she had been trained. Rather, those where she put her craft into practice.

She returned to the flat, percolated coffee, poured herself a cup, and took it back into the study. It was 3.30 in the afternoon, the first children passing below the flat on their way home from school. The windows of the lounge were open and she could hear them laughing. It had been this time in the afternoon – the thought was not quite subconscious. Autumn going into winter, though, the smells of a new season and the first hint of cold ...

... she was fourteen, tall and thin yet becoming attractive, even in school uniform. She had forgotten a hockey boot – had thought she had packed both – and run home to pick it up. The day before she had brought home her school report, the evening before she had sat in the warmth of the sitting-room, the fire blazing in the grate, while her father read carefully through it in the manner she called his solicitor’s style, her mother opposite her dwelling on every nod of his head. Grade 1 in every subject, it was no more than she had expected, had worked hard for. An outstanding student, the head teacher had written; we confidently expect superb examination results and university entrance.

The house was quiet, the grandfather clock ticking in the hall. Her mother and her aunt were having tea together as they did every Wednesday. Quintessentially English, Walker would think in the years to come, when the hate was fired and burning in her. Quintessentially bloody bourgeoisie. She wouldn’t disturb them, she thought, if she did she would have to explain, then she might be late for the practice. She ran quietly up the stairs, found the boot, and began to come down again.

The sitting-room door was slightly open. Her mother was showing her aunt her school report – she could tell by the conversation.

‘She’s done very well.’

‘Very well indeed.’ There was something in her mother’s voice which took her by surprise. ‘Considering.’

She stopped unseen on the stairs and wondered what her mother meant.

Even though she thought the house was empty her mother crossed the room and closed the door.

Considering what, the girl thought that night. She had everything, her parents were well-off though perhaps slightly old-fashioned, neither she nor her brother had ever wanted for anything. They lived in a large house in the Home Counties, had been educated privately from the age of four, and always been encouraged to study. Considering what? she was still thinking when she woke the following morning . . .

. . . the coffee was cold and the study was quiet around her.

Each of the jobs she had done for Conlan, or for others through Conlan, had begun differently. Some – the longterm jobs – had started this way: the months of detailed and often fruitless research. Others had been more immediate: a dead letter drop where the weapon was waiting for her, the target details, a back-up supplying the way in and out. Always, however, Conlan had insisted on two fundamentals: that no one ever knew her identity, and that everyone assumed she was a man. As if he always had the spectacular in mind, she could not help thinking again, as if he always had her in mind for it. That was why he had not used her for two years, had allowed her to disappear into the shadows.

The afternoon drifted into evening. She left the flat and took the underground to the West End. It was eleven in the evening, the night still warm. The lights of Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus were flashing behind her, the taxis filled with theatre-leavers and the streets busy. She left Trafalgar Square and walked through Admiralty Arch and into the Mall. The night was suddenly darker and colder and the pavements empty, only an occasional cab passing her. Six hundred yards in front of her she saw the lights of Buckingham Palace.

She would need access to the royal schedule, and one way to that was through the Wednesday List – the diary of engagements for each member of the royal family circulated by Buckingham Palace to the Newspaper Publishers Association and through the NPA to interested publications. The list, containing the skeleton of engagements for up to a year ahead and updated on a monthly and weekly basis, was sent out every Wednesday, hence its name. The PinMan operation, however, would require not just the official timetable of formal appointments where the target would be high profile and carrying massive protection, but – and more importantly – the details of the more informal and therefore probably more personal events, even though PinMan would still be accompanied by a bodyguard.

Buckingham Palace or the NPA? She was walking quickly, thinking quickly, weighing the options. If she accessed the computer system in the press office at the Palace she might also get inside the personal offices, get information not on the Wednesday List; if she made do with the NPA she might get less material but the risks were fewer. The computer security at the Palace would be more difficult to penetrate, yet in a way that did not concern her. What did, however, was the probability that at the Palace the system would, or should, pick it up immediately. And that might warn the security services.

A police car slid past her – the dark maroon of the Diplomatic Protection Group. She reached the Victoria Monument and stood looking up at the Palace, the standard fluttering from the flag pole. Queen’s in – she remembered the day she had stood here with her mother, the way her mother had pointed out the flag to her, she in her best school uniform and her brother in his school blazer.